Originally derived from FreeBSD 4.8, on July 16, 2003, DragonFlyBSD has imported many of the FreeBSD 5 tree's useful developments, mostly drivers and bug fixes.

DragonFlyBSD is focused at becoming highly scalable and is rewriting much of how the operating system uses it's processors. It is currently focused on the ix86 platform, but is keeping as open as possible to the AMD64, macppc, sparc and sparc64 architectures.

DragonFlyBSD's mascot is fred, a bright red dragonfly with his own plush dolls.

Currently working towards the 1.0 release, DragonFlyBSD is still not completely stable.

Using FreeBSD as the base Matt Dillon, a prominent Amiga, Linux and FreeBSD programmer, started DragonFlyBSD when a difference of opinion in how FreeBSD 5 should be developed arose, resulting in what some are calling the fourth major open source BSD.

DragonFlyBSD is a project with really big goals and a highly talented hacker leading it's development.